New service makes it easy for anyone to build and run reliable,
secure APIs at any scale

SEATTLE — (BUSINESS WIRE) — July 9, 2015 —
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:
AMZN),
today announced Amazon API Gateway, a new fully managed service that
makes it easy for AWS customers to create, publish, maintain, monitor,
and secure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) at any scale. With
a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can create an API
that acts as a “front door” for applications to access data, business
logic, or functionality from their “back-end” services, such as
workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), or code
running on AWS Lambda. Amazon API Gateway handles all of the tasks
associated with accepting and processing billions of daily API calls,
including traffic management, authorization and access control,
monitoring, and API version management. Amazon API Gateway has no
minimum fees or startup costs, and developers pay only for the API calls
they receive and the amount of data transferred out. To learn more about
Amazon API Gateway, visit
http://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway.

With the proliferation of mobile devices and the rise in the Internet of
Things (IoT), it is increasingly common for companies to make their
back-end systems and data accessible to applications through APIs.
Because so many applications use these APIs, and communities of
developers rely on them, companies are spending an increasing amount of
time and effort developing and managing their APIs. They have to create
and publish APIs, update and maintain API versions, and invest in
resources to monitor and ensure the reliability, security, and
performance of APIs that may experience thousands of API calls per
second. And, companies have to build and manage systems to authorize
access to APIs and verify incoming API requests before granting access
to the back-end services. Now, with Amazon API Gateway, customers have a
pay-as-you-go service that takes care of all of that undifferentiated
operational and security heavy lifting involved in creating and
maintaining APIs, authorizing access to them, verifying API calls,
monitoring API performance, and ensuring back-end services can handle
heavy API traffic. And, to make it easy for developers to use these APIs
in their applications, Amazon API Gateway can generate client SDKs for a
number of platforms, including JavaScript, iOS, and Android.

“Building and running rock-solid APIs at massive scale is a significant
challenge for customers. And yet, this is one of the most important
ingredients for building and operating modern applications that are
consumed through multiple devices,” said Marco Argenti, Vice President,
AWS. “At AWS, we have over nine years of experience running some of the
most heavily used APIs in the world. The Amazon API Gateway takes this
learning and makes it available to customers as a pay-as-you-go service
that eliminates the cost and complexity of managing APIs so that
developers can focus on building great apps.”

To help customers protect access to their back-end services, Amazon API
Gateway allows customers to use familiar AWS security tools such as AWS
Identity and Access Management (IAM) to verify and authenticate API
requests. Amazon API Gateway lets companies run multiple versions of an
API simultaneously so that they can develop, deploy, and test new
versions of their APIs without impacting existing applications. Once an
API is deployed, Amazon API Gateway allows customers to control the
number of API requests that hit their back-end systems within a certain
time period to protect them from traffic spikes, and helps reduce API
latency by caching responses. Amazon API Gateway also monitors the usage
and performance of back-end services, providing metrics such as number
of API calls, latency, and error rates.

For customers who want to build new back-end services without
provisioning new server infrastructure, Amazon API Gateway integrates
with AWS Lambda, which solves this problem. AWS Lambda allows customers
to write a bit of Java or JavaScript code and associate that code with
an event trigger. When an event (e.g. a particular API call) meets the
trigger criteria, AWS Lambda executes this code on AWS compute
infrastructure that is automatically managed. AWS Lambda automatically
spins up the compute, makes sure it’s run in a fault-tolerant fashion,
spins down the compute when it’s no longer needed, and only charges
customers for the compute consumed (in increments of 100 milliseconds).
This frees customers from having to provision and manage fleets of
servers to power their back-end services.

Mentor Graphics is a leader in electronic design automation, enabling
companies to develop better electronic products faster and more
cost-effectively. “We use microservice architectures for virtually all
of our development, and have been looking for a more simple way to
maintain and monitor APIs as we scale,” said Keith Childers, Solutions
Architect, Mentor Graphics Corporate Web Services. “Amazon API Gateway
is a perfect fit for this. We use it together with AWS Lambda to create
and deploy microservices that often experience spiky traffic, without
worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure and compute
resources. Now we’re able to focus on developing innovative services and
make them available to developers through APIs. Amazon API Gateway has
really made our developers’ lives much easier.”

Twilio is a cloud communications platform that enables developers and
businesses to easily embed, scale and operate real-time communications
in their software applications. “The Amazon API Gateway is a significant
value-add for developers because it allows them to focus on developing
great apps instead of securing and running their APIs,” said Nico
Acosta, Product Manager for Twilio. “Amazon API Gateway is a win for our
joint customers with AWS because it makes it really easy for developers
to connect Twilio and AWS to build highly performant and scalable voice
applications.”